For make benefit of glorious tubes

django-mozilla-product-details, because short library names are for wimps

While Mozilla’s web tools have been Open Source since the beginning, it’s become somewhat of a recent tradition for us Mozilla web devs to release web application components as reusable libraries (mostly in Python, and for the Django web framework).

Today I am introducing django-mozilla-product-details — quite a mouthful, but the name says it all: It’s a library providing up-to-date Mozilla product information to be consumed by Django projects. The data can be periodically pulled from the Mozilla SVN server using a Django management command.

The data source of Mozilla Product Details is a PHP library kept on the Mozilla SVN server, and was originally written so it could be included into PHP projects via an SVN external. A simple svn up would fetch the latest data when it became available.

In the meantime, the Product Details library received an additional JSON feed, allowing non-PHP projects to consume the data. If, however, the consumer is not kept in SVN like the library is, there is no easy way to keep the data up to date.

For Django projects, this app solves that problem.

To learn how to import and use the library, please read the detailed README file.

If you are looking into using the library in your project, or if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us or open an issue on github.

By the way: The geeks among you will be interested to know that we made an effort to go as easy as possible on the client as well as server bandwidth, even when the update task is frequently run. Over on my personal blog fredericiana, I wrote a blog post outlining the algorithm behind the library, and the rationale behind it.

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Fred is the web development manager of Mozilla's Developer Ecosystem team. He likes to solve tricky problems, is an Open Source geek, and brings German Engineering to the webdev crowd. Fred spends his spare time on the hunt for great food and real Italian espresso.